March 21st, 2013

It’s the first day of spring and the Persian new Year of 1392 starts with Noruz (No: new, Ruz: day):

We are celebrating in Paris with a newly converted Venus,

I have extensively written about the Noruz (or Nowruz, Norooz) before in my blog, so if you’ve been with me in the past 4/5 years, you must know all about the items that go on the Noruz spread.

The famous “haft seen” of 7 S’s:

My fish, Samad (his name has nothing to do with the S’s… ), has been with us since two Noruz’s ago and he is happy to play his role this year with the famous Haji Firouz , the politically incorrect Persian messenger of the New Year:

Haji Firouz’s face is covered in soot and he is wearing bright red clothes and hat. People consider it only as a face paint and there is no racial implication.

Do you remember Samad on my previous year’s Noruz card?

One of the S’s is Sekkeh or coin; the last Shah of Iran is overthrown even in my Haft Seen…

It was raining in Paris on the first day of spring:

but I didn’t care because a bunch of hyacinths can bring the spring to your room.

January 1st, 2012

March 2nd, 2011

“The age of US dominance in the Middle East has ended and a new era in the modern history of the region has begun. It will be shaped by new actors and new forces competing for influence, and to master it, Washington will have to rely more on diplomacy than on military might.” Richard N. Haass

Bourguiba Square in Tunis, Tahrir Square in Cairo, Azadi Square in Tehran , Pearl Square in Manama are witnessing a collective awakening of the Middle Eastern world and this means a major American policy shift in the region. Now that the Arab world is being remade from within, European policy must change too.

September 1st, 2009

Every summer, we somehow expect to see Red looking out our windows in Southern California…Only Dante can describe this Inferno…

The world witnesses Angelinos running away from wildfires one more time with the very similar images being (again) broadcast all over the world; my friends call me from everywhere to make sure that I am not one of the “evacuees”.

Every year’s fire seems more dangerous and more capricious; the picture above is taken from west Los Angeles with the fire mushrooming in the background (the red building on the right is the Die Hard building).

Just look at the downtown above…

You somehow never get used to the fire’s anger and unpredictability; after 30 summers in california, they still scare the hell out of me!

My eyes have been burning from the ashes and smoke all day and I am not even near the fires but my green mood is turning into red because of the wild fires.

Are we ever going to learn how to prepare for inevitable disasters and calamities?…

And of course we blissfully close our eyes to the fire dangers for another year and act surprised the following summer when it comes back; if you don’t believe me, read my posts on the subject for the last two years:

This oneis from last year. I still believe on what I wrote then: Southern California fires are pretty democratic, they hit the mansions and trailer parks and everything in between with the same cruelty… The current definition of a Californian is still “did or did not escape the fires?”

July 21st, 2009

An expression that can mean anything means nothing; when you want to please everybody, you please nobody.

Enrico Fermi, the great Italian physicist, killed all the aliens in 1950 by asking this simple/innocent question: “if extra-terrestrials exist, where are they?” This question has become the Fermi Paradox.

Even though I am a science fiction fan I do agree with the skeptics that, Houston, we have a problem:

a) the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) program to detect radio transmissions from other civilizations has been a failure.

b) the question of the Great Silence remains unsolved; if life is common, why don’t we detect their radio transmissions?

I remember the thrill of hearing about it on a hot summer day in Iran; the moon has not looked the same since!

Unlike my father, I am a lousy philatelist (postage stamp collector) but I was able to find the above page I bought in 1994—on the 25th anniversary of “the big step”—among my loose leaves.

The Drake Equation—an attempt to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way with which we might come into contact— is still fascinating to me but I see its light getting dimmer with every “silent year”…

N = R* × fp × nE × fl × fi × fc × L

This once serious equation looks more and more like this cartoon from this very funny site:

To commemorate the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s historic walk on the moon, Google is offering Internet users a virtualtrip to the moon.

I empathize with Fermi’s passion for clarity. I am simply unable to let things be foggy. The Drake equation is literally meaningless because “an expression that can mean anything means nothing.”